Wednesday, 24th of October, 2007

Stirring tale of mighty Rudd ascension:

I’ve been musing since yesterday over the demise of private BitTorrent site OiNK, and especially of the rather forbidding message now hosted there (”A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users”). In particular, I was thinking how this criminal investigation, if it finds anyone much, is going to turn up a huge selection of massive music fans with huge CD & vinyl collections, and what’s more a huge selection of professional musicians and DJs. Because many, many musos, and probably all DJs, are obsessive music fans.

I was going to write something up about it, about how despite its rather insanely huge selections, once I was able to check out its wares (well, its warez), I didn’t find much that I wanted, because I’m such a completist anyway; and about how most of the music I’ve “stolen” from filesharing over the years now exists on my CD/vinyl shelves anyway — eventually I’ll find a way of buying a physical copy of anything I like, and what, in the end, is the difference between a second-hand copy of an out-of-print item and a downloaded mp3 of the same, from the record company’s point of view? (Answer: nothing. The fuckerz really hate second-hand record stores too!)

And the strange morality of OiNK was something that struck me very much - enforced sharing ratios, enforced sound quality, stringent rules about formatting and information supplied; could I square that in my head with the illegality of the whole exercise? I’m not sure. Even the fact that it was forbidden to share leaked pre-masters and studio sessions, which in a weird way was actually reassuring.
To me if you engage in filesharing it’s as a way of getting to hear music in advance, and secondarily to get to hear rare items that frankly nobody deserves to get inflated prices for on eBay… (I know there are plenty of kidz these days for whom it’s just the way they get their music. Why, they feel, should they be forbidden from having some particular music just because they can’t afford to buy it? Sure, they need some educatin’ about how musicians need to make a living, but they also weren’t the denizens of OiNK on the whole, I’d say.)

In any case, the wonderful Jace Clayton aka DJ /rupture has written the perfect post on the matter, so go read DEFENDING THE PIG: OiNK croaks. Thanks Jace!

Tuesday, 23rd of October, 2007

Finally, Greg Egan has started writing fiction again, and not only do we have a new novel, Incandescence, coming out in 2008, we have a bunch of new short stories too.
There’ve been a couple of novellas in anthologies over the last year or so, and Asimov’s published the excellent “Dark Integers” (a sequel to Luminous, and an equally engrossing excursion into international espionage in the world of mathematical philosophy). Now there’s another new story, one that you can read online for free, if you’re willing to register at Technology Review (or, er, use BugMeNot).

I strongly recommend reading “Steve Fever”. It’s fun, quite short, and nicely demonstrates Egan’s touch - a personal story about strange technologies used to interrogate some pretty deep ideas about the world. It reminded me of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s remarkable nanotech quartet, especially Queen City Jazz, in which a nanotech virus infects people’s minds with an urge to travel down the Mississippi river. Goonan uses her solidly-thought-out scientific and technological ideas to tell a story about the history of America, its literature, blues and jazz music, and a kind of search for transcendence. Egan has often aimed at some of these themes himself (including transcendence within a scientific-materialist world), and Goonan was no doubt influenced by Egan’s astounding earlier works, so it’s nice to hear the echoes coming back again.